What are the consequences of the apology?
Apologies entail a political moral task, says Wouter Veraart, professor of legal philosophy at the Free University. ‘It is therefore logical that you pay attention to that past, arrange its commemoration properly, for example with a national holiday, and provide appropriate education about it. And that also opens up the discussion about repair. What do you do about the current forms of inequality and racism that stem from that past? How do you achieve recovery in the countries where the plantations were?’
That ties in with the recommendations of the Advisory Board of the Slave Past Dialogue Group, which was instituted in July last year by the now caretaker cabinet. According to the recommendations, the Netherlands must recognize slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity and make excuses for it. The college is also calling for a national holiday and a museum dedicated to slavery. In addition, the government must be prepared to remedy ‘this historical injustice’ and its long-lasting consequences as much as possible.
Does this pave the way for reparations?
Veraart would not be surprised if there are indeed lawsuits about reparations for descendants of enslaved people, but he says the chance that these will succeed is minimal. “There is the problem of statute of limitations. There is also the causality problem. In order to receive compensation for damage, you must be able to demonstrate that the damage was now caused by a concrete event at the time. In a traffic accident, the causality is very simple. But with slavery there are so many steps in between that it is almost impossible.’
At the request of a client, lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld has already looked a number of times at the possibility of recovering the damage caused by slavery from the government. ‘You then have to show who has benefited from slavery: the city officials, banks, elite families. Quite a lot of research has been done on that. But then you have the question: who is the claimant? Suppose a family says: we have mental damage, there is a problem with violence in our family because a lot of violence has been done to us in previous generations. You can’t get that done causally.’
The damage caused by slavery is of course considerable, says Zegveld, who previously assisted the widows of the village of Rawagede in West Java. In that case, the judge held the state responsible for the massacre in 1947. ‘But if the damage is very collective or difficult to specify, you can’t just translate that into a lawsuit. Our legal process is geared to individual cases and concrete facts, whereby the passage of time complicates matters greatly.’
Abroad, there are as yet no examples of successful grants of reparations to descendants of slaves. However, freed slaves in the 19th century won lawsuits and received compensation. France is this year celebrating the 20th anniversary of the law making slavery a crime against humanity — a step the Netherlands should also take, according to the advisory board — but all French reparations lawsuits have since stalled.
Is this the prelude to an apology on behalf of the Netherlands?
That indeed seems inevitable after the statements by outgoing minister Kajsa Ollongren of the Interior on Thursday at the celebration of Keti Koti in Amsterdam. She called the recommendations of the advisory board ‘important and not to be misunderstood’. “We can’t get around that.” Looking back means more than examining the past, Ollongren said. “It also means being accountable.”
The advisory board calls 1 July 2023 a suitable date for national apologies, because it will then be 150 years ago that slavery was actually over. After the abolition in 1863, enslaved people had to work on the plantations for another ten years, paid but forced. Ollongren joined the call, saying he wants to commemorate slavery “great and dignified” by 2023.
What actually determines whether an apology is good?
The run-up is crucial, says Veraart. ‘It is important that the representative organizations are included in the process. In addition, you should do good research first, so that you know exactly what you are apologizing for. It has also sometimes happened that apologies came unexpectedly and fell dead, such as when the NS apologized in 2005 for its role in the deportation in World War II. That came more or less out of nowhere. Later, reparations were announced. And then research was done. That’s the reverse order.’
In short, the apologies must fit into a larger whole. For years, attention to the history of slavery in the Netherlands has been increasing. Veraart: ‘Think of research, exhibitions. A genuine interest must precede the apology. Otherwise it seems that you want to get rid of it cheaply.’
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